Panel 4

What representative institution is more influential for policy outputs? A long tradition attributes policy outcomes to executives, downplaying the importance of legislatures in the process. We present a novel concept on legislatures’ political positions as key to defining political environments where policies are more likely to be adopted. Empirically, we propose novel measures of legislatures’ positions aggregating data across 3,467 parties represented in 178 lower chambers between 1970 and 2019 on four key dimensions: economy, exclusion, religion, and democracy. Connecting these with eleven policy outcomes, we show that they are not only significant predictors of welfare universalism, anti-immigration, LGBT inclusion, and climate change policies but also that they outperform the governments’ stances as an explanatory factor. This is valid across regime types for most outcomes while we also find that electoral rules mediate several effects. These results show that legislatures’ latent positions create key political environments for public policy development.

Conspiracy theories about election fraud in the United States often focus on state elections with exceedingly close ex post election results. In fact, five of the closest elections in the modern era have occurred since the year 2000, each generating widespread allegations of fraud, including the 2020 election theories that resulted in the raid on the US capitol. But while the public has treated the closest elections as the ones having the highest risk of being fraudulent, that connection has never been established through research. This paper proposes a mathematic argument for why, despite recent concerns, elections margins of victory of under 1% are not more likely to be the result of systematic clientelist or vote buying behavior, and tests that theory against real world global election data, including from the V-Dem database. It finds that, even when the outcome of elections are as close as 3%, 5%, or 10%, the relative proportion of elections that are won by margins under 1% or 0.5% is typically statistically higher for legitimate elections than systematically fraudulent ones, and no evidence for any tested situation where fraudulent elections were more likely to be extremely close than legitimate ones. These results demonstrate that the very election results people appear most likely to protest as manipulated are more in line with what should be expected of a clean election. As future elections continue to generate controversies and accusations of systematic election fraud, knowing the closeness is not an indicator of fraud may prevent overreaction by well-meaning policy makers as seen in recent elections.